[parpfish]

This is also a big party of why artists don’t earn shit.

Spotify will never be able to pay out enough if people don’t think this music is worth paying for.

They want access to every new album but refuse to pay how much a single new CD would have cost back in the day

[pluralmonad]

Aside from all the middle men nibbling at artist take, its also a symptom of trading on fundamentally un-scarce resources. A better business model is selling access to the scarce things like the artist themselves. Trying to maintain stranglehold on a particular order of zeros and ones is always going to be tough.

[parpfish]

That’s part of the reason that artists have made a bigger push toward selling merch as a means of making a living. But that feels so arbitrary and unsustainable to me.

Why should I buy a tshirt from somebody because I like their music? Fashion design is its own unrelated art form.

[doesnt_know]

Every entertainment market is saturated. Even if every creative endeavour stopped now, there would still be more freely available content to last more then any individual human life span.

Unless you’re the type of person that actively considers them a fan of something and goes out of their way to consume a specific niche, there isn’t much reason to pay much, or anything for entertainment.

[johnnyanmac]

>Unless you’re the type of person that actively considers them a fan of something

to be fair, that's a billion dollar business of an audience. Bandcamp is still a thing because people like that exist. So I wouldn't readily dismiss that.

But yes. We're in an age where people treat TV shows as "second screen entertainment", the silver screen is dying out, and where Spotify is flooding its library with white noise and AI slop. And people at best shrug. There's never been less respect for the arts, and it reflects in wider consumer patterns. Any future artists will need to appeal to a shrinkingly few fanbase of those who care about quality.

[imtringued]

If you get a Spotify subscription to support small artists, you'll be in for a rude awakening once you realize how Spotify allocates your funds.

Hint: Your subscription pays for the listening habits of free users. Who do those free users listen to?

The reason why Spotify is a raw deal for the artists you listen to is the same reason why it is possible to bot listens of your AI generated songs and get out more money than was paid for by the bot's subscription.

The entire Spotify business model is very peculiar in how stupid and wasteful it is and who the beneficiaries are.

What you should do instead is give yourself a fixed music budget, export your stream counts and subscribe to their patreons in proportion to how much you listened to them.

[johnnyanmac]

Spotify is a model where the artist suffers, the company itself works on a slim margin, and the record labels gets the lion's share. It's pretty much the worst case scenario business.

The issue even goes back to the days of CD's. The artist still wouldn't get that much back compared to the label publishing the disc. even in 2000 is was still more profitable to buy a tshirt than a CD from the artist.

I'm not very well versed in this area, but clearly something needs to change. Being able to independently published helps, but Spotify's model does indeed make it harder to sell your own albums despite it being easier than ever to distribute it without a middleman.

[writebetterc]

> This is also a big party of why artists don’t earn shit.

The pie that Spotify divides up among the artists is a global one. It's not like you listen to one artist, so they get your 10 bucks every month. You're paying Taylor Swift, even though you never listen to her.

[parpfish]

Their prorata payment scheme isn’t inherently good or bad.

If I listen to obscure indie band all month, some of my money will go to Taylor swift. But all those swifties are also paying obscure indie band.

[johnnyanmac]

it's not bad by itself, but I argue the opaque structure of it is horrendous. Especially in financial matters, you should be able to estimate how much money you get if you put X effort in and get Y metrics. But even getting a proper Y isn't straightforward, let alone Z payout.